California's governor Jerry Brown has signed a new bill at Google's headquarters which legalises driverless cars in the state, the beginning of a potentially radically different road experience.

California's governor Jerry Brown has signed a new bill at Google's headquarters which legalises driverless cars in the state, the beginning of a potentially radically different road experience.

The legislation was drafted by Senator Alex Padilla, allowing self-driving cars to be used in California, albeit with a number of concessions for the sake of safety.

For example, a licensed driver will still need to sit in the driver's seat, in case of an emergency where he or she might need to take control. This is a fairly sensible idea, though it is not clear what would happen if the car did not restore manual driving to the driver.

Despite the potential horror stories we can all dream up, this technology could prove to be much safer than letting people drive. Aside from the myriad of bad drivers out there who probably should not have a licence in the first place, human error is faulted for most recorded crashes.

Google has tested its driverless cars, which use sensors and location tracking, for a whopping 300,000 miles, with no accidents on file, apart from a single incident of a minor crash when one of the cars was being driven manually – which supports the argument of the role of human error.

Google expects the vehicles to be available for purchase within the next decade.